This Friday, 25th January, you can join Rockstar from 4-7PM GMT (11AM-2PM EST) and play in a variety of multiplayer modes from GTA IV, The Lost and Damned, and The Ballad of Gay Tony, on all 3 platforms.

For a chance at getting invited into a game you'll need to add one of the devs to your friends list.

It's been a while since we've had any GTA IV modding news to post about, but today, four years after the first public release, version 1.3 of popular modding tool OpenIV has been released.

OpenIV 1.3 bring two long awaiting features. First, now it possible to view WDR and WDD models from Max Payne 3. You have all same features in viewer like for GTA IV. Second, at last, openFormats for GTA IV now supports WFT “fragments” modes, this is mean soon you will have ability to import vehicles models into 3Ds Max. Also it will be possible to make “destroyable” map objects, like you can see in video above.

Rockstar have confirmed that the rumoured Rockstar Games Collection is indeed real, and will be going on sale in North America on 6th November, for PS3 and Xbox 360. The exclusive collection will retail for .99 and includes Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City, L.A. Noire, and Midnight Club: Los Angeles Complete Edition.

Comments by Rockstar on the newswire posting seem to confirm that the company has no plans to release this collection outside of North America, but they say to "stay tuned" regarding the possibility of other bundles. The '1' in the title of this release seems to imply there will be more to follow. There is no word on whether or not a PC version will ever be made.

While many of you reading this will no doubt own one or more or perhaps all of these games already, there will be many people who still don't, so be sure to let them know of this great deal.

The GTA IV: San Andreas team have released a new beta of their awesome total conversion mod that brings the world of San Andreas into GTA IV using the powerful RAGE engine. Beta 3 adds a whole host of improvements, fixes, and features. Probably best summed up by the team themselves.

In this new third beta, new features are added, including, but not limited to multiplayer, races, gang wars, improved Setup and Launcher, improved graphics, map, vehicles, sounds, peds, shaders, collision materials, timecycle... Plenty improved stuff to check out!

Watch the launch trailer below.

You can find out more about the mod on their official site where you'll also find download links. Be sure to join us and thousands of other GTA fans in our forums and let us know what you think!

Popular GTA IV modding tool OpenIV has finally reached a 1.0 release today. The main new addition in this update by GooD-NTS and the rest of the team is support for opening and viewing Max Payne 3 textures and collision bounds objects.

Other changes in this release include:

new texture viewer

improved GTA IV vehicle rendering

simple text-based format for easy WPL editing

many other improvements and bug fixes

The video below demonstrates some of the tool's features. Download links after the video.